By: Danielle Kreutter
The Buff Energy Star Program was put in place as an incentive to get building proctors involved in energy conservation; with another year comes three new winners: John Culshaw of Norlin Library, David Nicoll of Hellems, and Donna Maes from Mathematics.
Each of the nominees had to go through an energy audit with Campus Conservation Officer Moe Tabrizi. After assessing the building and finding out what are the trouble spots and what are easy fixes, the building proctors and facilities management team up to cut down the energy usage.
"It's a team effort thing, I play a pretty small part in it," said Hellems Building Proctor David Nicoll, "I'm just kind of the eyes on the building so if I see something it takes funding from facilities management, and it takes the techs that were down there to follow through on the work orders which they did a great job at."
Since the energy audit, Hellems installed low leak faucets and low flow toilet handles throughout the whole building, revamped the air circulation system, added solar film to windows that face sunlight frequently, and removed many desktop computers from their data labs and replaced them with rentable laptops; among other changes ended up reducing Hellems carbon footprint and their energy usage by at least 5% over the last fiscal year.
The combination of energy saved by all three buildings added up to around 650,000 killo watt hours which reduced over one million pounds of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions. Roughly $65,000 was saved from the campus utility budget that usually spends about $20 million a year on energy.
"The more we conserve the more we can shift that money to academic and research instead of just wasteful spending," said Tabrizi
Since the beginning of the Buff Energy Star Program in 2004, winning building proctors have helped save over $300,000 and a total reduction of CO2 by more than 4.5 million pounds.
Each of the nominees had to go through an energy audit with Campus Conservation Officer Moe Tabrizi. After assessing the building and finding out what are the trouble spots and what are easy fixes, the building proctors and facilities management team up to cut down the energy usage.
"It's a team effort thing, I play a pretty small part in it," said Hellems Building Proctor David Nicoll, "I'm just kind of the eyes on the building so if I see something it takes funding from facilities management, and it takes the techs that were down there to follow through on the work orders which they did a great job at."
Since the energy audit, Hellems installed low leak faucets and low flow toilet handles throughout the whole building, revamped the air circulation system, added solar film to windows that face sunlight frequently, and removed many desktop computers from their data labs and replaced them with rentable laptops; among other changes ended up reducing Hellems carbon footprint and their energy usage by at least 5% over the last fiscal year.
The combination of energy saved by all three buildings added up to around 650,000 killo watt hours which reduced over one million pounds of carbon dioxide greenhouse gas emissions. Roughly $65,000 was saved from the campus utility budget that usually spends about $20 million a year on energy.
"The more we conserve the more we can shift that money to academic and research instead of just wasteful spending," said Tabrizi
Since the beginning of the Buff Energy Star Program in 2004, winning building proctors have helped save over $300,000 and a total reduction of CO2 by more than 4.5 million pounds.
